making the switch

[runlikell]

Hey everyone, new here, just made the switch to linux (ubuntu) for the first time after using windows since it was first introduced. I must say it has been a much more pleasant experience than I anticipated. It feels good to be liberated, and I don't think I'll ever be going back.

The next step I take it is to convert my media files and free up more space for this OS. Can anyone point me in the right direction for figuring that out? And ultimately I will be deleting windows, once I'm sure I can do everything I need to on here. Thanx.

[wowbag1]

Hi welcome to the forum.
As you know what you have and want to do - go onto the ubuntu sites and check the listings and forums for people running what you want and for codecs / converters that work, then test because you may find that you have to keep windows around for a bit.

Also try WINE and crossover office to run certain windows apps on linux.

wowbag1

[oz]

Welcome aboard... hope you have fun with Linux!

[techieMoe]

The next step I take it is to convert my media files and free up more space for this OS. Can anyone point me in the right direction for figuring that out? And ultimately I will be deleting windows, once I'm sure I can do everything I need to on here. Thanx.

What kinds of media files are we talking about?

[runlikell]

Mostly mp3s, a bunch of pictures - bmp/jpg/gif's - and also various video files that I aquired through bittorrent that have who knows what kind encoding.

[elija]

Install the ubuntu-restricted-extras package. If you don't already have the capability ie your pictures, you videos should become playable.

Commonly used restricted packages
This package depends on some commonly used packages in the Ubuntu
multiverse repository.

Installing this package will pull in support for MP3 playback and decoding,
support for various other audio formats (gstreamer plugins), Microsoft fonts,
Java runtime environment, Flash plugin, LAME (to create compressed audio files),
and DVD playback.

Please note that packages from multiverse are restricted by copyright
or legal issues in some countries. See
Licensing | Ubuntu
for more information.

If you still can't see your movies, try installing vlc. It can play most things.

multimedia player and streamer
VLC is the VideoLAN project's media player. It plays MPEG, MPEG2, MPEG4,
DivX, MOV, WMV, QuickTime, mp3, Ogg/Vorbis files, DVDs, VCDs, and multimedia
streams from various network sources.

VLC can also be used as a streaming server that duplicates the stream it
reads and multicasts them through the network to other clients, or serves
them through HTTP.

VLC has support for on-the-fly transcoding of audio and video formats, either
for broadcasting purposes or for movie format transformations. Support for
most output methods is provided by this package, but features can be added
by installing additional audio plugins (vlc-plugin-esd, vlc-plugin-sdl,
vlc-plugin-arts, vlc-plugin-pulse) or video plugins (vlc-plugin-sdl,
vlc-plugin-ggi, vlc-plugin-glide, vlc-plugin-svgalib). There is also a web
browser plugin in the mozilla-plugin-vlc package.